Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

Publishing my book in 2024 was so consuming that it felt like a full-stop in my life. A natural ending, with nothing else after. Exhausted, I took a break from blogging while I promoted it, but life kept coming! Now, at the start of 2025, I realised I haven’t updated this blog since July. Here are several updates; at a total of 2243 words, each update could have been expanded into a longer post.

With support from the National Lottery Community Fund, OurBus Bartons welcomed new electric buses Basil Bus and Lightning with an event in September. The process to secure the funding and setup the structure we needed took almost 2 years!

Keen to keep up with Oxfordshire County Council’s pledge to switch to electric buses by 2025, we teamed up with of Middle Barton Primary School to support our campaign to join them. The pupils lobbied local politicians, explaining all going electric was important for them. It’s not very often that kids get to make a real change to the world we live in. We asked them to name the buses!

Once again, we found ourselves at the cutting edge of Community Transport, with no example to follow. As the first to introduce electric vehicles to its routes, we were also the first to encounter problems with insurance, manufacture, servicing and green certificates. The new buses have blended straight into our timetabled services and are popular with our hire customers.

Remember the village pub I was trying to save? The Fox inn, has been empty and on the market for 18 months now. It feels like the village is being held to ransom by the owner, with our community forced to watch as it falls apart. Why? The Fox’s owner has set an unrealistic asking price and refuses to negotiate with anyone.

The owner is mega pub company Stonegate Group, based in the Cayman Islands and owned by private equity firm TDR capital, accountable only to its shareholders. I believe the current asking price to be an overvaluation, based on the very unlikely potential of redeveloping our pub as residential land, instead of keeping it as a pub. The overvaluation assists the securitisation of the pub as an asset to enable Stonegate to refinance its own considerable debt. Stonegate has shown no interest in helping our community to retain its pub, even refusing to engage with a group of private bidders that offered a fair price.

We are playing a waiting game. Reminding the owner they still need to maintain this grade 2 listed building while it is empty. To show that there is still a strong interest in the community pub and to remind our community what they are missing without the Fox, the management team of the Community Benefit Society organised a Pop-up Fox event. A team of volunteers took over the village hall for a day, set up a bar with the help of local breweries and served Bockwurst, pretzels and sauerkraut from the kitchen.

Oktoberfest was a huge success. Several locals told me that they had socialised with people they had not seen since the last pop-up Fox almost a year before!  We took over £200 an hour through the bar, that is an achievement for any pub to be proud of! All the volunteers worked very hard. Helen and Bella provided musical entertainment while Billy and his friends collected empty glasses. As licensee, I cast myself as cantankerous, wheelchair using club owner Brian Potter from Phoenix Nights and discussed having a talent trek, bingo or ladies night. Having not done all day drinking since my university days, I quickly learned that positioning myself next to the bar was not a good idea as people went straight to the bar on arrival and seeing me there, insisted on buying me a drink!

One of the last people to leave, went to great lengths to tell me that you could never recreate a pub atmosphere where people actually met each other – I reminded him that he had just spent the last 10 minutes making a new friend at the bar! We are currently organising our next event, a Quiz Night!

A key observation in my book (now available in charity shops for 99p) is how exposure to my future wife’s family changed my outlook on life when I first met them 30 years ago. It was their approach to family and sharing that helped me discover and develop myself. And it still does. I was reminded when my 15-year-old daughter’s boyfriend, also 15, asked about staying over.

It was nice that he asked! I felt protective for my daughter and weirdly threatened by the idea of having another man in the house. I was 15 myself once! But I also remember staying over at a girl’s house with her parents in the home. Out of respect, I stayed in my room all night. From what we have seen of the boyfriend, we really like him, and most importantly, so does our daughter.

Helen, used to dealing with requests from children, took the plunge. Much to our daughters’ amazement, explained that we could accommodate the request, with boundaries. A bit late myself, I backed Helen up by explaining that we were expecting them to stay in separate rooms and at were placing our trust in both of them. The next morning, we all had a fun breakfast, our son especially likes having an older boy around.

The next time we saw Helen’s parents. I asked how they had felt when I started staying overnight at their house. Did John wrestle with the same issues as me? According to Sue, John gave his approval, saying “Let the them both enjoy it, while they are young.” What an incredibly wise thing to say.

In November, I stopped using Twitter. What was becoming my platform for activism, where I felt connected to the disabled people around the world and was becoming an influencer for disabled people, had descended into complete toilet after the acquisition of Elon musk. Accounts that had been banned, came back and filled my timeline with conspiracy theories, vile right wing hatred, violent or sexually explicit content, children being maimed and killed in war zones, or people having fatal accidents. I don’t like confrontation, I felt like I was constantly in the middle of a vicious argument.

Having amassed 900 followers, (most of those were probably bots!) I considered the “don’t let the bullies push you out” argument, but decided that by even being on Twitter, I was somehow part of the destructive social media and providing the bullies with the very attention they crave. Similar to when I stopped using Facebook in 2018, nobody noticed I had gone. Twitter used to be a force for good. It just seems that people cannot have nice things.

Occasionally I will watch or read something that I need to tell you about. I watch a lot of film and tv. As 2024 lurched to an end, I enjoyed Alien Romulus, JoJo Rabbit, Be Kind, Rewind, Zone of Interest, and the IP Man films. There were a couple of outstanding documentaries and biopics. The first was Aliens Expanded an exploration of Ridley Scott’s 1986 film with interviews with the actors, producers and film crew. As the end credits rolled, short messages by fans accompanied them. Many spoke about when they first saw the film. This convinced me that it was time for Billy (now 10) to see it! He is going through a bit of a gun phase at the moment so I think it enjoyed it.

A very touching documentary was Super/man: the Christopher Reeve story (2024). I had read his book, Still Me (1998), when finishing my own. I am full of admiration for how Christopher Reeve faced his impairment and bought hope to others. I wondered if his advocacy for all disabled people was limited by his focus on a cure for himself and those with similar impairments. The documentary acknowledges this, arguing that Christopher Reeve was very influential in the plight of disabled people, but sadly, no specific examples are given.

On TV, new seasons of Rings of Power, Only Murders in the Building, Time Bandits and the final season of the excellent Inside Number Nine and Futurama kept me waiting for the weekly episodes to drop.

I read much less than I used to, I still find reading for half an hour before sleep seems to help me relax. I was determined to help my daughter with her GCSE by reading an Inspector Calls by JB Priestley over the summer. By the second day, I was getting impatient with not being able to deliver any blistering insight. I tried to explain my lack of progress. “The family are all terrible people, but I am at the end of the second act, and the inspector still hasn’t turned up.”

“I think you’re reading the wrong play Dad!” Bella replied tactfully. Turns out I was. I was reading the Penguin anthology of JB Priestley plays called An Inspector Calls and Other Plays, the first play was called Time and the Conways. I had been reading about the dysfunctional Conway family. Luckily, one of Priestley’s common themes is socialism and the impact of war and capitalism on families – so it was useful to read another of his plays!

Audiobooks are an important part of my daily routine. I like hearing authors read their work to me while I have lunch. What could be better than listening to acting tips from Steven Toast, Alan Partridge’s latest bid to rekindle his career or Peter Kay reading his autobiography?

I hesitated before purchasing the latest book by John Higgs. I Have America Surrounded is about Timothy Leary, someone I have to admit I’d never heard of. I first heard John Higgs as a guest on the Adam Buxton podcast and I had enjoyed all his other books focusing on the counterculture of the late 60s and decided I could put my trust in him. I was not disappointed. I enjoyed learning all about one of the most divisive cultural icons of the late 60s and 70s. Richard Nixon called him the most ‘dangerous man in America’. I am looking forward to listening to John Higgs’ forthcoming book, Regeneration/Extermination, about Doctor Who in 2025.

At the end of the year, Sony sent me an email showing a breakdown of my use of the PlayStation. Apparently, I have logged a mighty 750 hours on the PlayStation network and my top games were Roblox, Minecraft and FIFA 24 (Billy plays these!). Just 60 of these hours have been me enjoying Red Dead Redemption II on the PS5. a friend of ours that we had known for 20 years but only saw every few months had recommended it and I had been playing it, fully immersed in the wild West, with our next conversation in mind.

In September, that friend went missing on his way home from work. After a few weeks, there was still no sign of him. His body was found in nearby woodland. An inquest will determine exactly how he died, but for now, Police say it is unexplained, but not suspicious. We knew the family were going through a tough time, but never thought this could lead to his death. Depression makes any situation much worse. One of the worst effects of Covid on me was the waves of depression as I recovered – weeks of feeling suicidal, the resulting insomnia just making it worse. I wish I could have helped him.

The end of 2024 was also quite a significant time for my Living with ataxia, another recurring theme of my blog posts. I had Covid again at the start of August 2024 and found the ceiling hoist I had installed in the bedroom to be of great help when I was at my weakest. As with my first bout 18 months earlier, I was left with hardly any energy and the alarming sense that my ataxia had progressed significantly.

I employed a Personal Assistant (PA) to help me get up, dress and get ready for the days when Helen and the kids went away for a week at the end of August. I thought I would have a lonely and difficult week. Thankfully, my brother stayed for some of the week as well, so we were able to eat meat, drink beer and watch films and football. It all went very smoothly and I have developed a good relationship with my PA. When Helen returned having spent the week feeling under the weather and with our demanding children in an unfamiliar bed, it was clear that I had a better time.

However, it made it clear that I was finding it difficult getting up with Helen and the children every morning. My PA comes one morning a week during term time to help me. I need more support and have attempted to complete a financial assessment to access it.

Actually, a lot happened over the last few months of 2024, I may have dropped out of the Blogosphere, but I don’t feel I had the chance to tune in, and turn on in a meaningful way.

Richard C Brown MBE – January 2025